Improved Partner Collaboration: “Strength in Numbers”

[Brovin Yaroslav]

Today more than ever partnerships are one of the most important enablers for successful software companies. Together with product they define success. While approaches to partnerships differ, even giants, such as Microsoft and Apple thrive because they built successful partnership ecosystems. Microsoft partners reportedly generates almost 10x more revenue than Microsoft itself. Apple, despite a much more controlled approach, practically turned the app development business into a household term.

Embarcadero is a far smaller company, but due to its history of product innovation has a large loyal community and a great partner network. In my assessment, our partner ecosystem has suffered during quite a few years of transition. Yet the innovative components that I have seen in my short time with Embarcadero make me hopeful and excited for the future. “Strength in Numbers” is the term for the opportunity that my colleague, Michael Swindell used, barrowing from Basketball. He will provide some context for everyone in our next webinar, but is an awesome inspirational story. Getting all the partners to play with us, knowing what we do best and what you do best can be hugely beneficial for everyone. This applies to all partner categories from Resellers, to MVPs, to Technology and Training partners.

Our initial focus was on global reseller partners, as we wanted to ensure a healthy business, and MVPs, who provide incredibly valuable input for our product development efforts. (I understand that sometimes, it is difficult to separate MVPs and Technology partners, as they frequently overlap.) Today, I feel that we have made significant strides to create a business dedicated to developers. We released two products in the last three months and have spoken with many, many customers who are happy with the overall business direction.

Going forward one of the most important tasks at hand is to rethink how we better collaborate with partners. I realize that this is going to be a journey and we will learn and evolve our approach, but I hope that this will be a rewarding journey for all involved. It means more frequent and open communications, sharing of product related news and code, co-promotions, highlighting each other’s successes and many more joined activities. Berlin 10.1 creates a nice foundation for improved collaboration by evolving GetIt that can introduce components more seamlessly into the IDE. We have lots of ideas how to further develop these capabilities in stages that can deliver value to our partners at every step. My objective is to see some of the initial benefits from improved collaboration as early as July, so stay tuned. If you are a partner, you should receive an invite for our Embarcadero Technology Partner Briefing on Wed, Jun 8, 2016 7:00 AM - 8:00 AM PDT.

 

Best Regards,

 Atanas

Просмотр полной статьи